How to Get Started with Influencer Marketing

In order to have a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to identify your main goal that you want to achieve from the program.

Influencer Marketing isn’t a fad. By the looks of things, it’s going to continue to rise as more and more brands are seeing successful outcomes.

Getting started with influencer marketing can be tricky – but with this article, you’ll be able to get your campaign up and running effectively. Follow the below steps to begin your influencer marketing journey.

1. Identify your main goal for influencer marketing

In order to have a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to identify your main goal that you want to achieve from the program. Most businesses usually look for influencers to help create and promote brand content around a specific event or a particular product.

According to a survey by Linqia, 89% of marketers used influencer marketing to create authentic content about their brand, 77% used influencer marketing to drive engagement around their brand and 56% used the channel to drive traffic to their websites or landing pages.

Once you’ve figured out the goal of your campaign, you should then create a few KPIs also known as key performance indicators. After doing that, you should then proceed to defining a suitable influencer profile.

2. Define a suitable influencer profile

It’s vital you define a suitable profile of your influencer, otherwise your program may not succeed as well as you thought.

Like mentioned in this article, a lot of brands have trouble trying to identify the right influencer for their program. To ensure you are choosing the right influencer for your campaign, make sure they follow the golden rules:

Active influencer that shares high-quality content regularly

Have a large and engaged audience that both comment and like

Appears to be authentic

Has a specific theme and style that relates to your brand

Don’t be mislead by the size of an influencer, that’s doesn’t always mean whether your program will succeed. The rise of smaller influencers, known as micro-influencers have at times helped brands more than what bigger influencers have. That’s because of their engagement rates.

In fact. According to Digiday, Instagram influencers that have a follow of 10,000 to 100,000 usually receive much more engagements (2.4% like rate) compared to those that have 1 million to 10 million followers (1.7% like rate).

3. Discovering potential influencers

So now you know what kind of influencers are worth looking into for your influencer marketing program, you now need to identify the suitable ones that match your company’s style and branding.

This part can be quite tricky, but with the help of tools like BuzzSumo, LinkedIn, Ninja outreach, you’ll be able to identify suitable influencers. However, if you want to make this process even easier and ensure you have the best influencers to work with, then using a specialized agency for delivery of sponsored blog posts, branded content and social influencer services is recommended.

You can of course discover influencers manually via looking at relevant keywords and hashtags on social media platforms to identify influencers who post about your industry.

4. Providing rewards for the influencer

When it comes to approaching influencers, you need to make sure the rewards you offer help you stand out from the rest. Believe it or not, it’s a tough challenge for some brands. Influencers are more motivated to work with a brand when they offer additional perks rather than just financial rewards.

In Augure’s study, the influencers surveyed mentioned their most common motivations are to increase their reach and engagement, create high quality content for their audience, shape their image, receive additional perks like discounts and free products, earn money and lastly live new experiences.

If you can offer additional rewards to the influencers you work with, they’re more likely to help you out and continue to work with you to help your company achieve more success through influencer marketing.

5. Measuring results

After you’ve launched your influencer marketing campaign and it’s up and running, you should regularly check on whether the campaign has helped you meet your desired goals.

The best way to measure your results is by looking at your KPIs you set in the first point. Set-up a google sheet and measure the progress on the metrics you set. By doing that, you may also learn a few extra things about running influencer marketing campaigns and what to do next to improve them even more.

Learn the latest trends, insights and best practices from the brightest minds in media and technology. Sign up for SMW Insider to watch full-length sessions from official Social Media Week conferences live and on-demand.

Gareth O'Sullivan

Social Media Influencer / Content Marketing Manager,

Gareth is a versatile digital marketer with experience on various social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many more. Gareth also writes various blog posts like this one. You can follow and stay connected with Gareth on his social media profiles.

Newsletter Subscription

Get the latest insights, trends and best practices from today's leading industry voices.

Conferences News & UpdatesWeekly Digest of News & Insights

Watch SMW Live

SMW Insider is a premium video platform that streams more than 180+ hours of talks, presentations, and interviews from leading industry experts.